Quote Originally Posted by Claviusnex View Post
Exactly this. Too many people look at the exception and make it the norm. There aren't enough players with more than one house to make a dent in the demand for housing. By forcing the return of houses SE does nothing more than make more of their player base upset and causes additional problems related to cash shop item handling. It is better to grandfather current multi-house owners and let them come to the market through attrition. If they wan to incent people to freely give up extra houses adding the automatic ability for alts to share housing would go a long way. Even this won't fix the problem. There are only two options for SE to resolve the housing issue. Add enough wards so every FC and player can have a house or create a fully instanced housing system where housing is effectively unlimited. They could even keep both, keeping the current wards for those who are willing to live with its restrictions and a parallel instanced system where they lift the item number restrictions, allow for upgrades on the same plot, etc.
The people who will be upset will almost exclusively be the people who have the extra houses, along with a handful of unaffected people with misplaced empathy. I don't have a lot of sympathy for them, as they knowingly abused the system to horde an extremely limited resource. And, as was stated, there aren't many of these people. Even if 100% of the folks affected quit the game in disgust after having their homes taken away, it would hardly put a dent in the subscription base. It should go without saying that not even close to 100% of folks affected will do this; maybe a small handful, with the remainder grumbling on the forums a while before everyone eventually forgets about it all.

By the same token, there aren't many of these people. Taking their homes away will not suddenly flood the servers with available housing. To me, though, gaining new housing is not the reason to do it, but rather to FINALLY address an injustice that has been tolerated for far too long. I mean, seriously; the moment SE announced that FC housing was going to be our personal housing as well, folks knew it was going to be a limited resource. Hoarders did not go in blind.